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Actor Barry Newman died recently at the tender young age of 92.<\/p>\n
Let’s step into the Professor Peabody’s ‘Way-Back Machine’ and go all the way back to the 1970s. The late ’60s and early ’70s were a luminous time for car guys in movies – who can forget Frank Bullitt’s famous chase?\u00a0 But a lot of folks don’t remember a movie that was essentially a four STATE car chase, called “Vanishing Point.” What McQueen did for fast-back Mustangs, Barry Newman did for an infamous\u00a0 white ’70 440 Challenger R\/T. Its driver, Kowalski (never a first name, just ‘Kowalski’, was a burnt-out Army hero vet car courier who shuttled cars between Denver and the West Coast. On his latest run, on too-little sleep and a bunch of weirdness-inducing amphetamines, he attempts to make it from Denver to the coast in record time – but attracts too much law-enforcement attention along the way. Combine the Corey Loftin* car stunts, a film noir mood, and some good ‘before-their-time’\u00a0 great guest stars (possibly only the second movie you will have seen with Cleavon Little in a starring role), and you have a combination well worth watching.<\/p>\n
After graduating from Brandeis University with a degree in anthropology in 1952, Newman was drafted into the Army, and having learned saxophone and clarinet in high school, he was assigned to the 3rd Army Band in Atlanta.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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